Menticulture Blog

World / Text

One objection to world-as-narrative (even before we get to what we mean by narrative exactly) is that it leads us to the world-as-text, and that the world clearly cannot be a text, since a text is nothing and the world is not nothing. We dismiss the idea of world-as-text, or there being nothing outside the text, because textuality, like other appearances constructed from amorphous things such as sociality or the imagination, doesn't account for the irreducible heterogeneity and difference of real things in the world. The text is somehow unreal because manufactured, or too finite in its human contingency.

But look, there it is: the text is there, see it with all its words, its syntax and its endlessly concatenating generative grammar. The words are there in your mouth, and though the action of the muscles slip around it, and the phosphorescent images that glitter in its wake seem to disappear, nevertheless there is something under and behind it - in fact it is the very split nature of the word, with its surface shape and graspability, always divorced from its object which we nevertheless feel resisting us, hunted and vague, that allows us to see in its surface the evidence of what withdraws behind it. Moving behind a veil, yet giving the veil its very form and movement, like the wind through the opening pushing at the hangings which present a shimmering masque of surging and crashing forms.

Much as they may be arbitrary and conventional signs divorced from their referents, nevertheless there is something indexical in the relation of words the objects they symbolise. Bachelard talks about the beautiful and disturbing moments when a native of a gender-inflected language encounters, as it were, cross-gender transformations in other gendered tongues, as in the French speaker whose masculine sun (le soleil) becomes feminine in German (die Sonne), or the reverse gender-bending switch of the moon (la lune and der Mond). The shock or uncanniness, the delight and conquest, in such encounters points at the allusive and affective pairings - alluding to the same suns and moons with their many faces and adumbrations, affecting us as the world of things remind us of their irreducibility, repaying the transferred emotions we invest in them, turning us around. For all that language can be a buffer or a space between us and the world, nevertheless it is not supernatural, and cannot always keep reality from insisting on its way.

Clearing

Every world is a sort of disclosing, a way of rendering itself intelligible. What is intelligibility but something that can be read into, read between, picked out and gathered together, what can be thought and made into word, spoken and accounted for. Any world, being finite and contingent, is the condition of our thinking and being thinkable, speaking and being spoken, gathering and being gathered.

The disclosure of this or that world is what emerges out of the background into the light, what things become intelligible in such light. The lightening itself, the clearing in which the world emerges from its ground, the earth, is the mystery. What storyteller is shedding this light on the world that has appeared? In what story have I become intelligible myself, such that I too am here, in this clearing of the world?

World / Nowhere

The world is a whole one, continuous if uneven. This wholeness can't very well be broken into parts without the kind of effort that pushes the parts out of joint, like cracking a rock to expose the fossil: what wonder to see the shell that has lurked for a million years bound up in the bonds of the rock! But also something is now over and done in that hammer blow, a deliberate stroke, over and above the everyday effort that allows us to pick our way through the rock-strewn shore. The petrified shape exposed in the rock is now left in the open, to be worn away by the familiarity created by its accessibility. No longer a constant furrow buried in a stone, silently ploughing its line in the thick of the world, it is now here, expressed from its bed, worn under light and water and foot, under a gaze, which is nowhere.

World

The world I mean is the one which allows me to say of myself or others, that we are worldly, or that we are men of the world, or that we know something of the way of the world. It is a world that has mood and colour, it has a certain underlying sort of flavour - a complexity below the many notes which is nevertheless its own. It is the sort of world that one could imagine being otherwise, if one wanted, in a daydream or moment of wishing.

I know too that the world has been otherwise, or at least that it evolves, and unevenly: I suspect it has always been a world in which dark air has brooded over rivers as the cities of civilisations have come and gone from their shores; but the world in which genetic structures are unlocked is a different one from the world in which humours are put into a different balance, or the world in which burnt entrails appease the angry gods. There are even worlds within worlds - the specific worlds of peoples, cultures, crafts, enterprises, knowledge, language, projects - each is an opening, intervening in the wider unfolding world.

We see the world and its long slow changeability when we put our minds to it. When we do not, though, it disappears - in fact it is always disappearing, or at least sublimating somehow so that it becomes transparent. Its invisibility and concealment is what allows me to rely on it silently. There is something imperturbable about the inaccessible depths that constantly burgeon in the world. The flavour and ethos recede into that background, but nevertheless continue to give their tones to my absorption in living a life.

The life I'm living is also a world - my world - but it comes after the outer world. That larger world is a shared one, and the commons of that wider world are the heritage that nurture my own. Far from being alone and locked in a single lonely realm, never to join or merge with the spaces of others, my own world is a borrowed one which pays its debt in kind. Only in the effort of putting the mind to the task, do I find myself in my own individual cosmos: soon enough, as I reabsorb myself into the business of being alive, the worlds of my self, and those around me, the worlds of commerce and pleasure, the world encompassing them all, merge back within one seamless horizon - changed somehow.

Surface

... there is an absolute gulf between Heidegger's readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. No real passage between them is possible, since the tool as a brutal subterranean energy and as a shining, tangible surface are utterly incommensurable ... it should be clear that every entity is ready-to-hand ... in the primary sense of "in the act of being", of unleashing itself upon the environment ... All of reality ... lies in a state of "metabolism" between the unchecked fury of tool-beings and the alluring facades through which we alone encounter them. (The Theory of Objects in Heidegger and Whitehead)

I always find myself deployed amidst a specific geography of objects, each of them withdrawing from view into a dark primal integrity that neither our theories nor our practices can ever exhaust. (A Fresh Look at Zuhandenheit)

If an object is always a vast surplus beyond its relations of the moment, it has to be asked how those as-yet unexpressed qualities are stored up for the future ... I am convinced that objects far exceed their interactions with other objects, and the question is what this excess is, and where it is. (The Revival of Metaphysics in Continental Philosophy)

I'm not attempting (or competent, not being a philosopher) to address the what and where of the excess of Harman's objects. I'm initially interested in Harman's way of characterising the presence of objects, and how different it is to Heidegger's attitude to Vorhandenheit. Where the latter denigrates the coming-to-presence of things in the world (as Harman notes, through the insistent epithet, 'mere'), the latter is always keen to celebrate it. Surfaces shine, sparkle and glitter; they are volatile, luminous, phosphorescent, radiant, resonant, dazzling; with faces, haloes, auras. This is not to say that he is less complimentary towards the withdrawing, strife-filled unleashing of the ready-to-hand, volcanic, turbulent, violent, primal tool-beings as they surge and thrust into the world.

Indeed this rich and exuberant world-surface constantly coming into action and awareness - the sensuous menagerie of the equally-footed animate and inanimate entities that jostle and strew the ground of the universe - seems to me to be just as excess-bearing as the long withdrawing surplus borne by the irreducible and unreachable inner core of real objects. That image world is right there, burning incessantly, coming about its business, hurtling out of the future rather than left over from the inertia of the past.

So I wonder then, what if we took the same steps with Harman's take on the "Heideggerian drama of revealed and concealed" as we took with Goffman's front and back personae: what the revealed hides is not a concealed substance, but its absence. Can we remove the 'effects' part of 'surface-effects', since there is now no causal agent hidden from view? Can the performance of the image be what facilitates the existence of the executant reality?

I realise of course that I'm veering away from Harman's specific arguments here, toward either Husserl's magical intentional objects which bleed sensual qualities without decohering, or toward re-instating a Kantian a priori apparatus which provides the form for the world's inhabitants to take up. But I'm not equipped to argue these points. Rather I just want to dispel hidden realities which betray their appearances, or illusory facades which belie some more authentic realm. Perhaps it is the same impulse which makes me recoil from the psychoanalytical requirement of a furniture of the mind - an unconscious which structures the conscious without permitting access to it. I don't want to bridge the abyss: I want to obviate the need for the bridge by unconjuring the abyss - closing the gap.

Thus I'm willing to concede I'm master of nothing, just as long as I can also say that friends who may turn out to be backstabbing machinators and sophists made themselves so not out of an inevitable and inscrutable essence, but because of the actions and interactions that they and I perform and enact - hence leaving the door open for such outcomes to be inverted: should we present alternative images, then we should unfold alternative executions in the world.

Being and Knowing: World as Diegesis

Another conversation, this time with Shaun, and more thinking through, thinking aloud, thinking thought. Shaun attended all the first year media theory lectures over the last academic year, including the six part series I delivered on narrative. So, he got to hear me rework and reiterate impressionistically over the same endless themes of diegesis and artifice, story and plot, world and representation which I surreptitiously pretended was an overview of narrative theory.

So I was attempting to explain how that period of intense focus on ideas about narrative and, in particular, the phenomenon of diegesis, had since inflected my thought. The diegesis is the storyscape - the integrity of the imaginary theatre we accept when we give over to a narrator the suspension of our disbelief. The diegesis is the internally coherent world of the story - and 'world' is the key word here, since the idea of a 'world' is one of the ways in which I'm trying to muscle into an understanding of Heidegger which I think is going to be central to my PhD thesis. If you are going to read on here, put your Kafkaesque reading hat on and read it all as subjunctive: "I would, God-willing, understand in this way..."

Using a combination of Graham Harman's lucid writing on Heidegger, Timothy Clark's valiant exposition of Heidegger's thought, Hubert Dreyfus' concordance and commentary on 'Being and Time', and the dense source text itself, I've been trying to work towards an understanding Heidegger's concepts of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, theoria and praxis, not to mention Dasein, being there, and being a 'thing that things'. The concept of 'world' in this realm of thought seems helpful to me. Clark says that Heidegger's use of the term 'world',

"is close to the common meaning of the term when we talk about the 'world' of the Bible, or the 'world' of the modern Chinese or modern English - i.e.the fundamental understanding within which individual things, people, history, texts, buildings, projects cohere together within a shared horizon of significances, purposes and connotations. [...] the more fundamental shared disclosure of things within which [we] find [ourselves] in all [our] thoughts, practices and beliefs, providing the basis even of [our] self-conceptions and suppositions."

- all of which seems to be a perfect definition of diegesis if understood as pertaining not only to the fictional worlds we muster, but also the fields of meaning we conjure in every aspect of what we still call 'real life'. In the tool analysis, Heidegger's hammer [makes sense | obtains | is grasped] as part of the world of equipment, which [makes sense | obtains | is grasped] as part of the world of human action. These realms cohere diegetically - they belong to, define and co-constitute each other. In action, we grasp the hammer as a tool, we extend our limbs and 'be' our intentional 'being' in the praxis of carpentry, and by extension, the praxis of existence. We act, and as we do, we are attuned to the world of action and meaning we inhabit: we experience the world holistically - we cease to be figures, and recede into the ground of the diegesis. Praxis is the means whereby we live and dwell - believe - in the diegesis.

The hammer when it breaks, shatters the diegesis: we are no longer engaged in praxis, but in the comprehension of material objects divorced from their diegetic meaning: an extreme Brechtian 'Verfremdung', or alienation from the essence of the hammer. A broken hammer is no hammer: it is a residue, a fragment, a memory, a concept, an idea, an object, a construct, a prop, revealed and separated from its function in the diegesis: a corpse in the theatrical sense - a moment in which the illusion is shattered, the figure of artifice processes and emerges from the ground of the theatre, and we are appalled enough by the shattering of the illusion to be compelled to laugh uncontrollably in the face of the futility of pretence. The broken hammer is an object of our reflective thought, which we diagnose in its symptomatic failure; it is seen as though from above, outside, from nowhere, divorced as it is from the field of praxis. Our consciousness of the broken hammer is the kind of consciousness we simply relinquish in the midst of being. It is empty, shell-like, valueless, objective. It is the transcendental knowledge to which the academy, science, Western materialist thought aspires - and as in the perennial cliche, it pins the butterfly to a board in order to comprehend it even as it dies.

Following Harman, I understand the fate of the broken hammer not to be merely an event in the life of a lone doomed tool, but to be caught up in the being of all things that do their 'being' - the 'thinging' of things, people, starfish and coconuts - the dichotomy between Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) and Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand). All things which are capable of submitting to the gaze of other things and being translated into the intentional objects of contemplation are uncovered - as are figures processing and emerging from the ground of their diegetic existence - as lifted out of their being, their dwelling in the multiplicities of the interlacing diegeses to which they belong. The object of my reflection is a shadow of its being - the prehensile presence-at-hand of a thing, behind which all its indestructible being - the inexhaustibly rich readiness-to-hand of a thing - withdraws.

In this way, anything we care to articulate or speak of, any 'thing' to which we care to give edges through the process of signification, and by which we mediate a representation of that 'thing' to another, is reduced to a presence-at-hand - a mere one amongst its infinite resource of arbitrarily graspable facets - a reduction; a theory. Thus all representation, articulation and signification is work in the realm of artifice, mimesis - or presence-at-hand; a reductive distinguishing of a facet of an object from the ground of its diegesis - the world of its Romantic potential, its being, its participation in praxis. The insertion of the stethoscope between the healer and patient is no less than a conversion of the human subject into an object of instrumentation, a reduction of the being to one amongst its many facets: a mediated, rythmic, booming pulse stands in for the beating heart of a living being. The sound is a metonymic reduction of the living being of the beating heart.

***

A short recap then: praxis is the unification of human action and knowing - holistic. Theoria (and hence conceptual, reflective, objective knowledge) is the distantiation of the world from the experience of that world. This distanced, alienated knowledge, extracted from the diegesis of its being, is a projection, a paper-thin shell, a shadow - a presence-at-hand, available to our consciousness as no more than a facet of the fullness of being. Being itself never emerges from the ground of diegesis - the integral, coherent, self-consistent, co-constitutive storyscape of the world in which we un-self-consciously dwell.

From these thoughts flow other problematisations, to be dealt with another time, of impartial academic enterprises, traditional doctoral theses, and the very nature of the attempt to document the research process.

You need to get out more

So we were talking about how you were in the hotel and the hostess asked what you did for a living...
"I work at the university"
"Teaching?"
"yes I'm a teacher there"
"what do you teach?
"Oh, interactive media."
"What's that?"
"Um, the internet and computers and stuff".
"Oh right, well, I'm about to buy a new PC and..."

So the question is, how are you as a middle class white male university lecturer really in touch with the real world - and I don't mean via your PC?